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Comments
Serpent isn't great with no artefacts. You're either sacrificing health or garrote speed when choosing between dexterity or constitution with your racial specialisation and trait selections. If you have 20,000 credits to drop purely on making a class good at bashing then Serpent is probably the best choice of any class in the game.
Bard isn't on your list, but that's also an affliction class. Like Serpent, it's also fantastic if you can invest a lot of credits into it. However, unlike Serpent, you're only losing damage - not attack speed - if you pick constitution over strength, so it's much less of an issue to do so.
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
- 4 hits to break limb of all health, uncomplicated math, checked.
- affs to play around, checked.
- not be buying credits, checked.
- still keep your 2h, no switching needed.
You just need to not stop at level 90.trueblind is blind, but things like wunjo don’t penetrate it, so you won’t see totems and anything thay requires you to be able to see. There are exceptions, but I don’t have a list on hand with that regard (afaik you can’t be transfixed by magi, but can be snapped by serpent? I haven’t personally tested either, and I’m not super reliable source!)
Anything I can optimize to maximize toe to toe time?
I am pretty sure you can avoid the bleed-route entirely and more or less negate it by not clotting outright/not clotting on corruption gained. This buys you time to stay in the room during the burst because you're not in an immediate threat of being killed, though you are certainly somewhat at risk. What I mean is that, if you do clot, you will clot yourself to death in like less than 2 seconds -- maybe faster -- but if you don't clot, you can sip through the initial bleed stack and continue attacking before having to really assess whether or not you need to leave the room, without losing whatever momentum you might have had leading up to this moment.
disclaimer: this understanding comes from what I've learned from @Uvian , who has used this strategy as a primary approach against people who clot, or do not have corruption handling, such as myself, until he explained the above to me. I no longer die to that route. In my case as serpent however, it forces him to go the pure locking route and marble para/imp/stupid spam into his rotations which effectively hinders me and prevents any and all of my stacking, placing a huge importance on me getting the first hit on a rotation where I need to stick to him every step of the way to generate a locking condition, so even though I don't die to the clot, I don't exactly gain much up-time in the moment dealing with it -- I simply force a reset. Mileage obviously differs class-by-class. But I think not clotting smartly buys enough time, that you can then use to optimize your dealing with it.